Our team of energy experts know ‘watt’s watt’…
oh come on, that was funny.
Okay, it wasn’t. But what we lack in humour, we make up for in our determination to provide the most efficient and cost-effective renewable energy solution for businesses like yours.
Our Team
The energy behind Mr Powa
The head-honchos? The top-dogs? The end-of-level bosses? Nope! Our management team are none of these things. Nick, Farooq and Kevin are down-to-Earth, approachable ready to help.
"Our aim is to make renewable tech as simple as possible by losing the 'geek speak' so our customers fully understand what they are buying and how it will benefit them. We are interested in helping with an overall energy strategy."
"We take the hassle away from our customers by liaising with landlords, dealing with insurers, talking to the fire service, your electricity distributors and provider. Technically and administratively, we handle it all. We are not daunted by complexity."
"To provide long-term value, installation is not the end of our relationship. If we find ongoing ways to save you money, we both win"
Our Background
How Mr Powa sparked into life
The founders of Mr Powa run a £350m online retailer called Buy It Direct (trading as Appliances Direct and Laptops Direct). In 2022 we decided to investigate how we could reduce our annual £500,000 electricity bill. We approached solar companies, battery installers and tariff consultants. But no-one we spoke to took a holistic view to solving the problem. Many also hid behind jargon which made it difficult for us to understand the real ROI .
So in the end we decided to work it out ourselves!
We found out about DNO applications, building regulations (for fire), the requirements of insurers, planning permission, weight-loading calculations for the roof, flexible electricity tariffs, how to improve the ROI of batteries using grid trading strategies, how to replace expensive-to-run air conditioning with heat exchangers and how to store excess solar as either hot or cold water.
At our Huddersfield warehouse, we installed a 1MWp (around 2,000 panels), a 60kWH battery to soak up excess solar and to also trade with the grid. We also changed our fixed tariff to a flexible one and and we significantly reduced our daily standing charge after discovering we had too much ring-fenced capacity.
We also found some very clever AI hardware that optimised our new renewable assets. This meant we could decide whether to store or export our excess solar depending on the solar prediction and our demand forecast. We also automated the timing of our forklift and EV charging to reduce the amount of bought-in electricity.
All this resulted in annual savings of more than £250k per year giving an ROI of less than four years. We are now moving to the next stage of our project as we can save another £50k a year by re-using the heat generated from our server room using heat exchangers and to store excess solar as cold water for our air conditioning and hot water for our heating. We are also moving our tariff to wholesale half-hourly rates (when sometimes we will be paid to consume electricity!).
We have learned so much by undertaking our own renewable energy journey that we decided to turn the lessons into a business. The mission of Mr Powa is based on these learnings:
